A few screens slipped out earlier this week from an accidentally posted trailer for what appears to be the next DLC pack from Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Entertainment for "Fallout: New Vegas." It is believed that the DLC, titled "Honest Hearts," has something to do with New Canaan, a Utah city conceived for the aborted "Van Buren" project that would have been "Fallout 3." Perhaps in response to the leak, Bethesda senior producer Jason Bergman has stepped up with a post on the company's forums offering some information about the coming DLC and why it's not here yet.

Well let's get the big bombshell out of the way (in case you didn't pick it up in the headline): the next DLC pack, whatever it may be (coughHonest Heartscough), "has been complete." The reason we've not seen it yet is because the dev team has been busy working on a patch to hopefully fix some of the outrageous and occasionally game-killing bugs that continue to plague "New Vegas" now, five months after its release.

Bergman writes that the patch is now finished and has been "handed off to the necessary platform owners." He expects that we'll be seeing it go live sometime in "the next couple weeks," though it is impossible for him to be more specific than that since it's now out of Bethesda's hands.

As for what's in the patch, why don't we let Bergman take it from here: "While there are bug fixes, our core focus was on improving stability and performance. We worked directly with first party platform owners to identify issues, and we have fixed a great deal of the crashes and lockups that people were experiencing. In addition, we scoured the forums and this patch includes weapon balance tweaks and other requested fixes."

Bergman acknowledges that there's still more work to be done, and promises that the team will continue to monitor the forums and look for more issues. Another update is planned "further down the line." It's fair to say that "New Vegas" has been worse than most new AAA releases when it comes to post-release bugs, but the quality of the game beyond those issues is strong enough that most of us have been able to overlook it. Still, good to know that the game won't crash anymore if you let go of some random cowboy hat.